1 republic of uzbekistan ministry of higher and secondary specialised education

Leonard Bloomfield
(April 1, 1887 – 
April 18, 1949) was an American 
linguist who led the development of 
structural linguistics in the United 
States during the 1930s and the 1940s. 
He is considered to be the father of 
American 
distributionalism. 
His 
influential 
textbook 
Language, 
published in 1933, presented a 
comprehensive 
description 
of 
American structural linguistics. He 
made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, 
the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages 
of the Algonquian family. 
Bloomfield's approach to linguistics was characterized by its 
emphasis on the scientific basis of linguistics and emphasis on formal 
procedures for the analysis of linguistic data. The influence of 
Bloomfieldian structural linguistics declined in the late 1950s and 
1960s as the theory of generative grammar developed by Noam 
Chomsky came to predominate. Distributionalism can be said to have 

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originated in the work of structuralist linguist Leonard Bloomfield and 
was more clearly formalised by Zellig S. Harris. This theory emerged 
in the United States in the 1950s, as a variant of structuralism, which 
was the mainstream linguistic theory at the time, and dominated 
American linguistics for some time. Using "distribution" as a technical 
term for a component of discovery procedure is likely first to have been 
done by Morris Swadesh in 1934 and then applied to principles of 
phonematics, to establish which observable various sounds of a 
language constitute the allophones of a phoneme and which should be 
kept as separate phonemes. According to Turenne and Pomerol, 
distributionalism was in fact a second phase in the history of linguistics, 
following that of structuralism, as distributionalism was mainly 
dominant since 1935 to 1960. It is considered one of the scientific 
grounds of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and had considerable 
influence on language teaching.